IntelliGantt turns Project Management in to Managable Projects. From the keyboard of a MOSS MVP, through the pipes of the internet and direct to your browser I love putting data on the move. And, as it turns out, writing about it.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

One of our top customer requests for IntelliGantt for SharePoint has been support for user timesheets that convert into 'actuals' within the IntelliGantt project management tool. We're happy to announce the arrival of IntelliTimesheet, which builds upon a basic SharePoint custom list for recording values and integrates with IntelliGantt for converting these values into actuals. We've designed IntelliTimesheet to be 100% mobile friendly as we believe the majority of users will 'clock in' using their mobile devices-- iOS, Android or Windows Mobile. All the project manager needs to do is send their colleagues a SharePoint link that they will use to start and stop time on their tasks. Here's how it works in detail.

First, you will want to download the latest 'online' package from our IntelliGantt server. This overview will work with Office 365 online, but it will work the same for 'in house' servers as well (just download our 'in house' package). Create your 'IntelliGantt' directory within your site's 'Site Assets' app, then copy the contents of IntelliGanttOnline.zip to it. Our 'help page' has detailed instructions for both installations.

Clicking on 'IntelliGantt_online.aspx' will show you the latest and greatest IntelliGantt for SharePoint Single Page Application (SPA). At first glance it looks the same, however, if we scroll the table columns you will notice the introduction of 'Actual' fields.

In you Site Assets/IntelliGantt directory, click on 'IntelliTimesheet_Online.aspx. This will launch out IntelliGantt time tracker.

Oh yes, one more setup step-- we need a custom list to store all the tracked time information.

Remember that IntelliGanttTemplates.zip download? Let's get that and upload the IntelliGantt_Timesheets.stp file to the template gallery. Then, simply add IntelliGantt Timesheet as another application.

Now that we have a repository for our time data, let's open up IntelliTimesheet_Online.aspx once more.

Just the basics with big buttons to make things as easy as possible on a mobile device. A user 'Clocks In' to start keeping track of time and 'Clocks Out' to stop. They can also take breaks or go for lunch, which keeps the current job 'active', but suspended until they finish their break or lunch. They can also view the history of all their timesheets or simply complete a task with a single button. Which tasks, you might ask? From a dropdown box populated with only their assigned tasks. The user chooses which of these they are working on. For example, let's choose our one assigned task and clock in.

When we clock in for the first time, we treat this as the 'Actual Start'. Therefore, back in IntelliGantt we will see the 'Actual Start' field now has a value for this task.

When we clock out, IntelliGantt will compute the amount of time between clock in and clock out and show this as Actual Work. We use days as the default, but hours, minutes or even seconds are supported too.

Notice that the 'Actual Cost' column still shows $0.00? This is because the assigned resource does not currently have an hourly rate. Let's provide one and see how things change. Click on the 'People' image in the upper left to open the tool. Select one or more users we wish to work with (note that this also acts as a filter within the task grid/gantt chart). John Milan has 0 as his hourly rate. Let's change this to 100.0.

Since we have an hourly rate we can now multiply that by the Actual Work involved to produce our first Actual Cost of $5.61. Naturally these cost values roll up.

Finally, because IntelliGantt also tracks duration, we can use the hourly rate to fill in our estimated Cost as well using the assigned task duration. As a result, we see how the actual cost of $5.61 compares to the estimated cost of $6000.0. Looks like there's more work to be done!

We are very excited to introduce this new feature to IntelliGantt project management with SharePoint. Thanks to your feedback we've got an excellent 2nd application targeted for mobile users to simply track their time on a task wherever they may be. We look forward to hearing your feedback on additional features to make your lives easier. Perhaps tracking geo coordinates as well? Hmm....

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I create tools for SharePoint, Basecamp, Google+ and Facebook for my own products and for contracts. I've focused on SharePoint Project Management solutions for the last 7 years with worldwide deployments and specific contract solutions for multi-million dollar products and initiatives. I'm here to help with what the industry needs today and tomorrow. Contact me if you have a product you'd like to integrate with web-based platforms.